| Sergeant
Dickinson is the Radioman of a Special Forces A-Team in the Central
Highlands of Vietnam. The camp is encircled and attacked for nine days
by the North Vietnamese Army, anxious to lure larger American units
into combat for the first time. Dickinson survives, just. The remnants
of the team are broken up, the soldiers scattered among other
commands. A unit that battered, goes the thinking, can't be put back
together. Can he? The war grows ever larger
and darker but Dickinson has the ethereal clarity of a person who has
been shot at: "the almost dying and then not dying. Afterwards is the
best thing there is."
Critics Comments
"You won’t know what hit
you. Sergeant Dickinson takes no prisoners. It is merciless,
concussive. It nails you to the ground; the next best thing to not
being there."
John
Westermann
Ladies of The Night
"[F]ew novels in any genre
are as lucid, or as memorably spooky, as Jerome Gold's new book,
Sergeant Dickinson...it belongs on the high, narrow shelf of
first-rate fiction about battlefield experience. The novel's laconic
narrator is Ray Dickinson, a radioman with a Special Forces unit in
the Central Highlands of Vietnam. His camp is encircled by the North
Vietnamese Army, and a full-scale assault is expected any day. What
little information Dickinson can glean about the war, or about his
unit's hope for reinforcements, arrives over his radio, and much of
what he pulls in sounds like madness...All around him, Dickinson sees
madness, too; some American ground troops, for example, have begun to
shoot at their own planes – they're that envious of 'men who could
just fly away from it all.' Gold, who served in Vietnam as a Special
Forces sergeant, writes spare and elegant prose that belies the
brutality and the claustrophobia he evokes here. His slim novel is a
carefully chosen assortment of details and impressions; he expertly
dismantles the myth – dear to civilians as well as soldiers – 'that if
you do everything right no harm will come to you.'"
Dwight Garner
New York Times
"A many-faceted jewel is
the best description of this book because it forges humanity out of
the most inhuman war situation. Gold has created a wry, war-worn
character whose take on all that occurs around him will not be easily
forgotten."
Beverly
Gologorsky
The Things We Do to Make it Home "An extraordinary, spooky,
hallucinatory novel about the Old, Lost War and the agony of the
Americans ordered to win it. Don’t think you’ve already read enough
books about Vietnam – here comes a truly great one."
Gloria
Emerson
Winners and Losers
(National Book Award Winner)
"Jerome Gold’s Sergeant
Dickinson goes beyond A Farewell to Arms. It’s proof that the madness
of war cannot be understated without blooming even more horribly in
the reader’s mind."
Stewart O'Nan
A Prayer for The Dying
and The Vietnam Reader (Ed.)
Readers Comments
Extract
Copyright © Jerome Gold
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